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By their nature, older images tend to need a little bit more tender loving care
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when you're applying your adjustments. In this case, for example, I have an
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image that is a little bit washed out and lacking in contrast.
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Instead of using brightness contrast however I'm going to use levels to apply
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an overall brightness and contrast adjustment.
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And the reason for that is that the levels adjustment allows me to work on
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the highlights and the shadows separately.
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I can adjust the white point to determine how bright the brightest areas of the
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photo will be separate from the black point which determines how dark the
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darkest values of the image will be. Let's take a look at how the levels
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adjustment works. I'll start off by adding an adjustment
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layer for levels, and so I'll go to the bottom of the layers panel and click on
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the Add Adjustment Layer button, the half black half white circle icon and from the
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pop up menu I'll choose Levels. That will add a levels adjustment layer
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and as you can see I now have the adjustment controls available to me on
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the properties panel. Just by looking at the histogram on the
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properties panel, we can see that overall contrast is actually reasonably good.
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There aren't any pixels that are pure white.
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You can see there's a little bit of a gap between the histogram and the edge of the
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display nor are there pixels that are completely black.
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We have a little bit of a gap on the left hand side as well.
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We can also tell from the histogram that most of the information is shifted toward
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the brighter values. Most of the pixels in the image are
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brighter than middle gray, and that's why we have this overall sort of washed out
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appearance in the photo. So while generally we have good contrast,
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when it comes to those values that are a little bit brighter than the midtones
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there's not much contrast at all. And it looks like in this case that was
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in large part due to haze in the environment.
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I'll start off by adjusting the black point and the white point for the photo.
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I'll adjust the white point first. And by clicking and dragging the white
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slider over at the right underneath the histogram, I can adjust the brightness of
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the brightest values. I'm establishing a white point.
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So if I move this slider further and further to the left I'll be making more
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and more pixels appear as pure white with no detail whatsoever.
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At the moment, for example, you can see that any pixel that has a brightness
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value that's just a little bit darker than middle gray will become pure white.
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And that happens to be most of the pixels in the image.
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I'll go ahead and bring that white point back out toward the edge of the histogram.
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And in most cases, that's exactly what we're going to want to do, is move the
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white point, and for that matter the black point, right up to the end of the
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histogram itself. Of course we can make a more informed
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decision about where to adjust the white point and the black point by holding down
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the Alt key on Windows or the Option key on Macintosh.
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When you hold the Alt or Option key and then adjust the white point, for example,
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you'll see in indication, a very clear indication of which pixels are losing
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detail, based on that white point adjustment.
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And in most cases, you'll want to bring the white point slider over to the left
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until you see some pixels appear. And then you'll want to move over to the
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right just to the point where the last of those pixels disappear.
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That's not going to be true for every single image but in most cases that
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approach will serve you well. I'll perform the same basic adjustment
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for the black point. I'll hold the Alt or Option key and click
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and drag the black point over to the right until I start to see pixels
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appearing and then I'll move back over to the left until the last of those pixels disappear.
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And that indicates that I'm enhancing contrast in the photo, but not
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sacrificing any white or black pixels in the process.
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Notice by the way, that the adjustment for the white point was a little bit
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stronger, than the adjustment for the black point.
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And that's one of the advantages of using levels, rather than brightness contrast.
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We can adjust the whites and the blacks separately with different values for each.
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In some cases you might also want to tone down the value of white.
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In other words, to have the white point in the image not actually appear as white
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but rather as a relatively bright shade of grey.
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In this image for example, I could take the output slider, the white value for
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output, over to the left. That's the white slider underneath the
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gradient here, and you'll notice that this causes the brightest values in the
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image to be darkened up a little bit. You'll want to be very careful if you're
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toning down the whites or toning down the blacks in the image because it can create
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a very muddy appearance very, very quickly.
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But in this case I think a minor adjustment of that white point, so that
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we have little bit more density in the brightest areas of the image, will
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actually prove helpful. Finally, now that I've adjusted the
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overall contrast in the image I can adjust overall brightness.
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For that, I'll move the midtone slider, the gray slider, underneath the histogram.
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Moving to the left will brighten the image and moving to the right will darken
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the image. And in this case I want a little bit more
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density, I don't want the image to appear too dark, but I want to be able to make
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out a little bit more of the texture. So I'm going to darken up those midtones
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just a little bit, trying to balance the adjustment between the foreground areas
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here, which have good density at the moment, and the background areas which
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are a little bit lacking. But again, that's mostly due to haze.
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So I'm not going to eliminate the appearance of haze.
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I just want to try to tone it down a little bit with my overall tonal adjustments.
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So as you can see, the levels adjustment gives us a little bit more control
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compared to the brightness contrast adjustment, which can be very helpful in
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improving the overall luminance values in our photos.